Shattered expression

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A new exhibition laments the worldwide loss of cultural
voice, writes Louise Bellamy.

Sitting at his dining-room table strewn with
ancient-looking artefacts that appear rusty, mossy and fragmented,
sculptor Dale Cox explains they were recently unearthed along
Melbourne's Docklands precinct at the mouth of the Yarra River.

Fixated on their armored bodies and toy-like heads, he says
research has indicated they could date as far back as between 1400
and 1430 AD - predating European settlement by centuries.

He produces a set of photographs documenting the site's
excavation and says it's possible the objects are the remains of a
Chinese "junk" trade vessel, "because the figurines are terracotta
Chinese Qin Shi Huang warriors and it is well known the Chinese
were a formidable naval power in the 15th century". Then he cites a
website and a number of publications on which he has based his
theory.

Each object has a sliver of white paper attached to it
indicating a speculated date of origin. Many of the faces are
disfigured, presumably due to time and erosion, and the armour is
patchy because, he explains, he had to glue so many of the
cast-iron shards back together.

Finally his intensity wavers, he begins to smile and admits the
truth: the figurines, the photographs, the slivers of paper and the
story about the Chinese junk vessel are a hoax and the content of
his latest show, The Yarra River Cargo, at Diane Tanzer
Gallery.

The figurines are derived from a range of pottery figurines
bought at two-dollar shops, which he smashes, beheads, treats with
a patina to give them their "ancient" appearance and glues back
together. The heads, based on plastic toys of readily recognisable
icons of 20th-century pop culture including Mickey Mouse and Donald
Duck, are moulded, treated with the same patina and glued to the
warrior bodies.

The exhibition - 50 sculptures, eight photographs taken by the
Photography Department, Collingwood, as well as written
documentation about China's naval history - is "an artistic inquiry
into the dislocating nature of globalisation, which makes society
homogenised, culturally diffused and without ownership of place,
ideas, information or, indeed history".

Cox says the figurines, based on the famous terracotta warriors
who guard the tomb of Emperor Qin Shi Huang - copies of which have
been mass produced since their discovery in China in 1974 - are raw
materials he uses "to blur the lines of cultural appropriation".
Likewise, the marriage of the pop icons with the warriors "plays
further on concepts of dislocation, the borrowing of culture and
its reinvention as a cultural hybrid, a decorative object devoid of
historic context".

That all the purchased plastic toys are made in China is no
coincidence.

"I deliberately chose China as the origin of these 15th-century
'exportware' creations because we are currently witnessing the
ascendancy of China as the industrial hub of 21st-century
capitalism's unquenchable hunger for mass consumer goods
worldwide."

Another aim of the show is to debunk the myth that there is a
clear lineage of Australian history "in an age of uncertainty when
history is constantly rewriting itself".

The idea behind the show is, he insists, as important as the
sculptures themselves because "without the narrative the works
would just be the end of the idea, whereas the narrative encourages
us to question aspects of Australian history and highlights
inconsistencies which already exist".

Cox, 36, who teaches oil painting at the National Gallery of
Victoria and drawing classes at Victorian College of the Arts, has
held a number of solo and group shows since graduating from RMIT in
1990.

His home is a rambling Victorian terrace in Fairfield where he
lives with artist Emma Busowsky. And Cox's life, by his own
admission, is light years removed from his childhood home in
Macleod where he was raised "on white bread behind a picket fence"
and attended the local state primary and secondary schools.

Every room in his house is filled with objects he's been
hoarding since a boy. There's a set of James Atkinson's Bears
Grease "to remedy baldness" dating back to the 1880s; ceramic
ginger beer bottles from 1900; and a 1880s magneto machine "for
nervous and other disorders" to name a few of the thousands of
objects that comprise his collection.

Constructions he's made from MDF board, painted in varying
colours, decorate the walls and feature delicate images drawn from
microscopic impressions of amoebas and symmetry found in
nature.

He explains the works, which were exhibited at Prahran's Smyrios
Gallery last year, were born out of a need following the September
11, 2001, terrorist attack "to make something beautiful in response
to the day the world changed forever".

The back lawn is covered in clay fragments from the warrior
figurines he's smashed. And there's a bath on the rear veranda used
daily - even during winter - a sign that the material wealth his
latest show takes issue with remains firmly in the domain of
artistic, not personal, interest.

The Yarra River Cargo is at the Diane Tanzer
Gallery, 108-110 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy until August
6.